The film gives you the unassailable integrity and strength of Dobbs’s widow, Brigid, even as the torment is stamped onto her face and her voice begins to break from the grief of it. If you’re looking for genuine bravery, you can look no further. Her dignified resilience, the umbilical to joy she maintains for her two fatherless girls (she speaks of their nightly dancing in the kitchen), and her steadfastness at the hardest task there is, the successful rearing of children. Her class of courage is more capacious, and more important, than the suicidal brand of bravery of men doing 180 miles per hour through antique villages lined with stone walls, a bravery indistinguishable from imprudence. You can’t watch Brigid Dobbs in the lush scape of her New Zealand home, and those tiny beauties riding tiny motorbikes in homage to their dead father, and not feel whole segments inside you collapse.
Another rider remarks, with ample sadness, that Dobbs died in his pursuit of love. That might be true enough, but the syntactical inverse is also true: he loved the pursuit of dying. Here’s what Brigid Dobbs herself says: “You can’t love the death, you can’t love the loss, but you can’t love the excitement and the thrill without knowing that that’s part of it. It wouldn’t be so exciting if it didn’t have the risk. That’s why they want to do it.”
And that’s what I’ll never understand: how his lust for the thrill conquered his love for the two blond beauties he and Brigid invented together. Because they needed him more than he needed that blast, that bang in his blood, and now their kids will grow up without the ballast of a father. They were four and now they are three, and that minus-one, that gap, never heals. What is our responsibility to our passion when measured against the responsibility to our children? Watching Dobbs’s kids—and feeling a stab of that late-night mawkishness when the house is still and the ale bottles empty, that supernatural deal-making with imaginary magistrates—I knew I’d swap my own father for theirs. The Reaper could keep mine if only he’d bring theirs back.
There’s a shot near the center of the film that lives in me still. The camera, fixed to one side of the road, aims intently across at the bucolic calm, at the silence and stillness on the other side, only the slightest sighing of the hornbeams, a flutter from a kingfisher, the whistle of a skylark, a gray-stone church, its steeple arrowed at clouds, a megalithic crucifix watching the day. And then you begin to hear them in the distance, coming from the right, coming to kill this pastoral pause. You’ve heard the sound of the approaching high-pitch gasoline scream, how it ripples on air, an exhaling to a needled crescendo. And when the crescendo comes, directly in front of the stationary lens, you can hear it, yes, it’s right there in front of you, but you can’t see it. There’s only a green, then a blue, then a red blear: blink and they’re gone.
On the Isle of Man or on Slifer Valley Road, that’s what two hundred miles per hour looks like. Chromatic ghosts caught on film. But barely.
I had to see, to touch, my father’s bike. There was no getting around that. I had to see and touch it the same way family members of the deceased aren’t satisfied, aren’t on the footpath to acceptance—not closure, ludicrous untrue term: doors and windows get closure—unless they have a body to behold. Doubting Thomases all of us, we must finger the wounds and then lick the blood. Look at Caravaggio’s searing work called The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. That is us. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. But it’s not easy being blessed.
A week after the funeral, my uncle Nicky went with me to the cycle shop in Pennsylvania where Myron had inspected my father’s bike. I had to unsuction myself from bed at dawn and meet Nicky at a rest stop somewhere on I-78 in western Jersey. For the hour it took us to reach the cycle shop, he told me stories—they tumbled from him in such nostalgic glee—about the Sundays he’d spent riding with his brothers and Pop, how commonly close they’d all come to getting crushed, shredded on the asphalt, and the day he’d spent in jail after surrendering to state troopers, after hours of outrunning them, cat-and-mousing them, through the vales of eastern Pennsylvania.
“It was fun,” he said. “It was so much fun. I miss it.”
One of the riders who often joined their pack was a Pennsylvania outlaw they called Crazy Chris: mid-thirties, Norwegian complexion and mane, outfitted in all-white racing leathers and white helmet as if to mock the virtue of angels. Crazy Chris had racetrack experience and was, Nicky said, one of the most naturally gifted riders he’d ever seen, a guy born with his hand in the throttle position, gasoline in his blood. His bike was a hodgepodge he’d built himself, a Suzuki GSXR 750 cc frame with a 1,000 cc motor: a faster engine in a lighter, tighter scaffold. He knew all about the proper geometry, the desired rake of the forks to the frame. If you’re road racing, you want the front wheel at the proper distance from the rear wheel. If that distance is too far, the bike won’t tip into turns at high speeds. You want the front wheel tucked under the bike and not too far out on elongated forks like a Harley chopper. Choppers have to slow to a near stop in order to make a turn. On the Suzuki 750’s frame, the wheels were closer, so it handled much better in sweeps, but Crazy Chris wanted the extra torque of a 1,000 cc motor, and so he Frankensteined his bike into a frightful anomaly.
The bike wasn’t legal, not even a little, neither registered nor insured, and his homemade license plate was a greeting card for cops: it said FUCK YOU. A loner who never stayed long with the pack, he went off to taunt police into chasing him. He’d flip them the bird, peel out, rip doughnuts in front of them. There wasn’t a police cruiser in all of Pennsylvania that could catch his bike, and so he’d deliberately slow, wait for them to gain some ground on him, flip them off again and then scream away, sirens wailing uselessly in his wake. Once, after disappearing for an hour to play with cops, he rejoined the pack, was suddenly there again among the others, doing an effortless, mile-long wheelie at seventy miles per hour, looking at Nicky as he passed. His helmet seemed to be smiling.
We arrived at the cycle shop by nine that morning. Inside, each bike gleamed, the scent of fresh rubber and polished chrome, of new plastic and oiled metal. It took no effort at all to see how some men felt an aphrodisiacal tug toward these machines, their amped-up sex appeal screaming for release in speed, a release never fully achieved and so ever renewable. Every Sunday the needle moves farther to the right, farther toward the red, because all week long you’ve felt it building in you, accumulating through your loins. And when this ravening hunger for release becomes not la petite morte but le grand morte? Then the fluids that are lost can’t be replaced, and the desire remains one of eternal unfulfillment.
Watch some MotoGP guys whisper to their bikes before a race, watch them caress the gas tank and handlebars, listen to them speak about those bikes, about feeling through the bike to the tires, to the track, and you’ll hear tones of amore. They’re speaking about a love affair, a zestful devotion, a thrilling bliss only sex comes close to matching. In Italian—the top two racers in history are both Italian: Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi—the term for a motorcyclist is centauro: centaur, the fusion of life forms, animal and man, machine and man, the fluidity, a symphony of movement.
At the cycle shop we met Myron, the one who’d told me on the phone that I should feel proud of my father. He and the other men at the shop looked at my uncle and me and nodded, most solemnly, in what seemed reverence or honor. A comrade had fallen, and we were that comrade’s kin. I thought they were about to salute us. Don’t underestimate that: these men on motorcycles revel in the camaraderie, the familial bond they make, a flashy caste of primitives, hunters out for the sustaining kill. It was, my uncle told me, half the reason he’d ridden each week, because it calcified this link with other intrepid men, this elite and clandestine club breaking laws on back roads, engaged in deep play, that irrational frolic in which the risks far outshoot the rewards. You see it with rock climbers, with base jumpers, with loons in wing suits.
Many a middle-class domestic male has a blood-need for the daring, the dangers of th
is tribalism, the dynamite of speed that for half a day elevates them above the routine of their lives. (Larkin: Those living ghosts who cannot leave their dreams.) It was soul-enhancing to be one of the worthies tuned into this thrill; every Sunday the ride replaced a disappointing God, the ride as rapture, the speed a substitute deity that saves or smites you. I almost understand it.
We went out back and saw it there, leaning on a boulevard of sunlight: the red and the white, the steel and the chrome that laid my father on a gurney, not the chariot he’d hoped for. Its wounds were oddly minimal, telling little of such irreversible work. The slash in the gas tank looked like a claw’s quick swipe at doughy flesh. The left handlebar was bent inward from impact with the road, the left mirror and blinker gone, the foot peg ground off.
My uncle squatted to inspect the front brakes and tire tread. Astraddle the bike, clasping the clutch, the brake, the throttle, balancing its heft beneath me, seeing the speedometer, I tried to imagine what my father saw at a hundred miles per hour, the odd and unfocused world, how it must have seemed to him as he dashed through it. What else could I do but put my hands on this machine and try to imagine? We’d driven all this way so I could touch the bike for six minutes and be enlightened about nothing, no closer to whatever knowing I sought. An addled mourning has that effect; it spins you through cycles of pointlessness as you try to adjust your compass to death’s terrain.
IX
Twelve tedious pages, stapled in the upper left-hand side, typewritten, and next to the insignia at the top, these words, in caps and italics: COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA ACCIDENT REPORT. But the first word you see when you slide the report from its manila envelope, the lonesome word perched there in caps, centered at the top of the page, is FATAL, the de facto title of the report. I’d mailed fifteen bucks to the Springfield Township Police Department and they in turn sent me this photocopied document of my father’s death, more pages to feed the mandatory obsessiveness of grieving.
On the first page the data lie in blocks under headings—police information, accident information, accident location—and there are a total of seventy-seven numbered boxes. My father’s bike (and sometimes my father himself) is referred to as UNIT #1, which has its own block. Some of the data are exceedingly clear: box 13, labeled # KILLED, is marked with the Roman numeral I. (What insouciant shorthand, that particular use of the #.) Other data are deliberately cryptic: box 47, BODY TYPE, is marked with the number 20. Box 50, INITIAL IMPACT POINT—meaning, I think, the guardrail—is marked with the number 9. They didn’t think to include a key for me to decode these digits, and so I’m left wondering what “20” means for my father’s body type, and why the guardrail has been designated a “9.” You can make yourself batty with this.
More mystifying is box 55, DRIVER CONDITION, which is marked with the number 1, and most mystifying is box 52, TRAVEL SPEED, which is marked with a 0. So my father’s condition as a driver was number one and his speed was zero. If either of those numbers had been accurate—if my father indeed had been the number-one driver and if his speed really had been zero—then he would still exist and this accident report would not. Of course those digits signify other things, things to which only officials are privy, and those things naturally have no metaphorical reach. For instance: box 14, # INJURED, is marked 0 but should contain 12 at least, one for each member of our immediate family, beginning with Parma, whose injuries were evident each time she spoke, evident in her eyes, her gait, her gaze. It’s an unbelievable sight, how emotional ruin bleeds into physical ruin, how an inner agony forms to the face, heart-scourge camped in the bones.
There are more cryptic digits at the top of the second page: ILLUMINATION is given a 2 (meaning, perhaps, that I could have rather dismal expectations for being illuminated), ROAD SURFACE is a 1, and WEATHER is a 0 (is it possible to have zero weather?). But at the center of the page, the report commences with a narrative. In fact, box 87, which takes up most of the page, is labeled just that, NARRATIVE, and the rest of the ten pages consists of this unusual mode of storytelling.
It’s not storytelling as most prefer it—beginning, middle, end; development, denouement, resolution; narrative arc and readily workshopped themes, the A-B-C of O. Henry—so consider the Latin source of “narrate,” gnarus, which means “knowing.” These policemen narrators want you “to know” right from the start of their story, because at the base of the second page, in box 89, VIOLATIONS INDICATED, next to the line marked UNIT #1, they dish you this bit of info: DRIVING VEHICLE AT SAFE SPEED, by which they mean, of course, the opposite of safe. It begins this way, from the middle of page two to the middle of page three, in the prose of investigator Daniel J. Branch:
Weather: Hot & humid
Temperature: 90 degrees
Road Surface: Black top
Upon arrival at the scene, I observed Driver of Unit #1 being attended by emergency personnel. The operator of Unit #1 was transported to St. Luke[’]s Bethlehem Trauma Center by ambulance where he was pronounced dead.
Evidence: I observed two single skid marks from Unit #1. The first skid mark started in the east-bound lane of Slifer Valley [Road], and was 56 feet in length. There was a gap of 40 feet, then the second skid mark was 54 feet in length. There were scrape & gouge marks in the west-bound lane. Unit #1 was moved approximately 30 feet [from] the point of final uncontrolled rest by bystanders. The damage on Unit #1 indicated it landed on its left side. A puddle of fuel from Unit #1 located on the roadway indicated the point of final uncontrolled rest. There was a yellow warning sign that warns drivers of the right curve ahead. The recommend[ed] speed posted on that sign is 20 MPH.
Notice how Officer Branch begins the rapid drama of my father’s death: with stage directions, and no periods, as if those three conditions—of the weather, the temperature, and the road surface—exist in perpetuity. For my father, they do.
The temperature is not insignificant. At three in the afternoon, after five hours of racing in ninety-degree heat, you can maybe imagine the rider’s burnout, how hot both he and the bike are. The heat isn’t a problem for the bike; the hotter the day, the happier the parts. Everything works better in the heat. (Pros run a warm-up lap before the race: the fluids don’t flow and the tires don’t stick if the bike isn’t hot enough.) But an overheating human body is a drained, sluggish body, and a drained, sluggish body errs against the sovereignty of physics.
For sixteen years I’ve been looking at that common phrase at the end of Branch’s first full paragraph, “pronounced dead,” and I’ve never got used to it. The passive voice of it agitates me, and also that “pronounced,” as if the state of his cessation, the reality of his being dead, was contingent upon somebody saying so. I now pronounce you man and wife. I now pronounce you dead. The verb I want there is confirm. A doctor confirmed he was dead, had died, had killed himself with speed on Slifer Valley Road.
I wondered too why Officer Branch starts his second full paragraph with “Evidence” and a colon, because, following the pronouncement in the previous line, it seems as if what he’s going to present after his colon is evidence of my father’s death. And what would that evidence look like rendered in narrative? Is a story ever really proof of anything? Of gigantic grief or being gone? Of a fractured neck and larynx, of intracranial devastation? No—the stories we tell are suggestions of what’s possible, intimations of verity, stray vestiges of knowing. You see after a few lines that what Officer Branch wishes to put forth is evidence for the conclusion he’d stated on the previous page: the failure to drive at a safe speed.
Add up those three numbers: the first skid mark is fifty-six feet long, then there’s a space of forty feet, then another skid mark fifty-four feet long. Total: 150 feet, a tidy round figure—fifty yards, or half a football field, or the average length of a block in Manville. Those three numbers tell an unambiguous tale:
He emerged over the crest in the road, saw the curve, locked up the back brake—it’s what you do when you need to stop immediately—and
skidded for fifty-six feet. Then he let off the back brake for forty feet. Whether or not he was trying to slow with his front brake, the one with too-slim padding, I can’t say. Then he locked up the back brake again for fifty-four more feet. By that time, the bike was beginning to tilt at the start of the curve. It won’t stay upright when the back brake is locked, not when it’s still moving at eighty miles per hour. And he wasn’t going to have any of that. He wasn’t going to let the bike go over. He wasn’t going to lose it. So he released the back brake then. He righted the tilt as he went into the turn. And that’s when the rubber caught the road. That’s when the catapult happened. That’s when all of this happened.
For sixteen years I’ve been trying to imagine my father’s thought—singular, because there wasn’t time enough for more than a lone thought, one that is nine-tenths emotion—as he emerged over the rise in the road and saw that ninety-degree turn there waiting, with patient and deadly resolve, with infinite terminus, on the other side of it. I’ve tried to imagine his feeling—singular too—as he went into that skid. He had to know it was bad. You lock up the back brake only when it’s bad and you’re trying to keep it from getting worse. But he couldn’t have known much more than This is bad.
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